The Daydream That Wouldn’t Die…
Two years ago, I was anxious. The next day, my first full-length novel, “Tears of the Dragon,” was set to launch on Kindle. A year earlier, one of my short stories, “Sketch,” had been published on Mandatory Midnight, a spooky online zine. That had been the spark I needed to inspire me to finish my novel. You see, I had been working on this novel for years. It became the ever-present project that lurked in the background, behind all the important stuff.
Admittedly, it was a daydream when I started. My wife inspired me to develop some ideas from my overactive brain and put them onto paper. Turns out, putting an idea on paper was the easy part. Developing it into a story, that was something else altogether. I found it easy to write a plot synopsis. In fact, I wrote quite a few, with the intention of my first story being a spooky thriller involving an everyday joe being turned into an energy vampire of sorts. I plotted that idea and a bevy of others into elaborate outlines that still lurk in my idea folder, waiting to see the light of day.
One of those outlines was a story that I came up with as a tribute of sorts to the Ian Fleming 007 stories. It involved a specialist/assassin named Xavier Greene and his mission to recover a bioweapon. Initially, the story was called “The Silencer.”
After fumbling around with my spooky tale for a while, I decided that “The Silencer” would be a better story to cut my teeth on, so to speak. So, I shelved any minor scribbling I had done with the other story and set out to create my novel. At this point, the daydream became a hobby, and I worked on it in my spare time. First, I planned an elaborate outline in which every paragraph became a separate chapter. This worked well because once I finished the outline, I already knew what the book would look like, structurally speaking. It’s an efficient system that I still use to this very day. In any case, I started writing and actually finished a couple of chapters. They weren’t bad, per se, but I had a lot of polishing to do for my writing skills to be good enough to write an entire novel. So this went on for literally years. I would write a chapter occasionally and then put the whole thing away for a month or two.
My wife got a job at Accuweather the following year, and we shipped off to Wichita, KS. There, the brutal Kansas winter, combined with my wife working at night, gave me a new routine: sitting on the couch and writing. That, along with the fact I had been taking any writing job I could find, had helped my writing and discipline improve. I saw progress, albeit slowly, and the novel began to take shape. Of course, life got in the way after that, and several years would pass with barely any actual writing being done. But in the meantime, I continued to take writing jobs for clients and anyone else who would let me write. All of the work, as well as my studying, helped my writing ability improve immensely. Finally, I started writing chapters in earnest again, mainly to fill my long, cold Kansas nights. Before I knew it, I was three-quarters of the way through the novel. Then, life threw us another curve, and we moved to Brownsville, TX. Moving across the country again meant the writing would have to be paused for several months as we moved and settled in. Then, the pandemic happened.
During the pandemic in the summer of 2020, Mandatory Midnight picked up “Sketch.” It was a short story I had written for Halloween several years back. I was thrilled. After that, I launched myself into finishing the novel, which had gone from a hobby to an obsession. What else was I supposed to do? We had moved to a new place, and the world had fallen apart. I had nothing else. Finally, sometime in the fall of 2020, I finished the novel. I remember feeling lightheaded when I announced to my wife that the work that had loomed over me for years was finally completed. Of course, I still had to learn about the complete hell of editing, but we all know how that goes. The thing was, I didn’t necessarily want to release the book yet. My logic was that with the pandemic going on, it might get lost in the shuffle. That was probably the best thing that could have happened to me. Waiting to release it caused me to take the time to polish it, rewrite it, and rewrite some more. Over the next six months, I had a crash course in editing as the book went through revision after revision.
Finally, I decided the book was ready for release. On September 1, 2021, “Tears of the Dragon” hit Kindle and Kindle Unlimited. Since then, sticking with my mantra of “everything is a work in progress,” the book has seen several different covers and made several more rounds of edits as I slowly figured out what I was doing. The latest version is, in my opinion, the best version of the book. I will probably not be doing any more edits.
Since the first novel’s release, it’s been quite a journey. I’ve cranked out three more novels and a short story in the past two years. That’s quite an improvement over my first book, which took approximately seven years to complete. But what can I say? I learned a lot over those seven years and have developed myself into a reasonably disciplined author, even if I’m still learning and making it all up as I go along.
The journey to my first book and the journey since have been utterly amazing. I couldn’t even come close to thanking everyone I would need to thank. All of your support means so much to me. I’m delighted you’re all on this journey with me. Most importantly, I owe my wife, Amber, my eternal gratitude and love for always believing in me and putting up with my hobby-turned-obsession. Finally, I want to say happy second anniversary to “Tears of the Dragon,” the daydream that wouldn’t die but instead burnt a hole in my cerebral cortex until I had to let it out into the world. It’s been a wild ride so far. Here’s to many, many more!
– Ryan
